Noticing

“I wonder, did we know we were happy?” Paulette says as she picks up the photograph with a hand that is lined with wisdom and age. The fingers of her other hand taps the image softly once, twice, then three times.

Caresses it, as if to reach back in time, to sit once again beside the man who was her husband for over sixty years. To feel the warmth of his body against hers, maybe to lean her head once more on his shoulder, to breath in his scent and say, This. This is happiness.

Later, Emilie, Diane and I are eating dinner at ‘Le Marilyn’ in St. Rémy, at a table for three just inside the open-air restaurant. We’ve already been caught by skies that turned dark on a dime with rolling thunder and pounding rain to risk eating under an umbrella this evening.

As we wait for our meals to arrive, we snack on olives with toothpicks, sinking into an easy silence, comfortable together after three weeks.

My own reverie takes me back to where we’ve just spent the day – Forcalquier, a small town in the Alpes-de-Haute-Province, where Paulette lives. She’s a much-cherished friend of Diane’s and before today she was just a name on our itinerary to me.

It’s funny and amazing and wondrous how the sacred can drop into our lives when we least expect it. Even when we’re on a pilgrimage seeking the sacred, when our senses are heightened to see, to hear, to experience. To expect.

And then, and then, and then…..

Close your eyes once,
Lean back in your seat,
Relax,
Let go,
Surrender.

Hand over the reins of expectation to the Universe.

Once you do that,
Maybe, maybe, just maybe…
Then maybe a Paulette will walk into your life.

Maybe she’s nearing ninety but walks the cobblestone hills near her house
with an energy that defies age.

Maybe her beauty will shine as much as her wisdom,
As much as the force of the feminine,
As the Light of the Divine,
As much as the lustre of the grey braid
That rests between her shoulder blades,
That makes me think of my own grey hair,
Hidden by a box bought at Whole Foods.

I’m thinking of Paulette and the transmission we received just by being in her presence. Sitting, now, in a restaurant named for a woman we can only know through imagination, through the filter of a stranger’s interpretation, who has become an archetype, a symbol, and perhaps a reckoning.

An invitation…
A question…
A noticing…

I wonder, do we know when we’re happy?